For your enjoyment I have gathered together details of well over a hundred old books that relate to glass in some form or another, all of which are easily accessible over the Internet.

Whether it’s the glass sands of Kentucky, glass manufacture, glass painting, old trade catalogues, collecting glassware, making laboratory glassware, old Church windows or one of the many other strange topics relating to glass, there’s surely something for you somewhere in the list. I hope you find something that tickles your fancy.

Downloadable Book Lists

Although you’ll find the book list below within this blog I’m sure that some of you will want to “do your own thing”. So, I’ve created three alternative files that you can download and fiddle with. You could then sort your copy of the book list by title, date or author, improve the topic lists, add more books, or whatever else you might fancy doing. Make the downloaded files your own personalised bookshelf!

Beware: Although the file names below have familiar file types like “.doc” and “.pdf”, they aren’t what they seem to be. I’ve had to do some simple “trickery” to enable you to download file types that WordPress, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen not to allow. So, be sure to read the text that follows the filenames before downloading them!

Bookshelf-rtf.docActually this is nota “.doc” file, it’s a “.rtf” file. I had to rename it from “Bookshelf.rtf” to “Bookshelf-rtf.doc” before WordPress would to allow me to share it with you. So, please rename it back to “Bookshelf.rtf” once you’ve downloaded it. Let me explain… Unlike “.doc” files, “.rtf” rich text files are Microsoft’s only official “portable” file format for word processing documents. This means it can be loaded into many kinds of word processor applications and not just Microsoft Word. Use this file if you want to maintain and use the book list within your word processor. If this doesn’t work for you then try the Bookshelf.xls file format in your spreadsheet application and copy the table out of there into your word processor application.

Bookshelf.xls This spreadsheet file really is an “.xls” file and it is saved in an old version of Microsoft Excel format so you don’t need Microsoft’s latest and greatest bloatware to use this file. It should work with some other spreadsheet applications too. Use this file if you want to maintain and use the book list as a spreadsheet. If this doesn’t work for you then try the Bookshelf.tsv file instead (see below).

Bookshelf-tsv.pdfActually this is nota “.pdf” file, it’s a “.tsv” file. I had to rename it from “Bookshelf.tsv” to “Bookshelf-tsv.pdf” before WordPress would to allow me to share it with you. So, please rename it back to “Bookshelf.tsv” once you’ve downloaded it. This is a “tab separated variable” file that can be loaded into most kinds of spreadsheet application, word processors and even some database applications. Treat this as your “last chance” file format because you’ll probably need to do some messing about to get what’s loaded into a nice useful state. Despite this it’ll be much quicker than trying to type everything manually.

If you struggle and fail with all three file formats, or have a particular need for some other file format for use on something other than a Microslop Windoze machine then do let me know and I’ll try to help.

Some Notes

The Title, Author and Date columns should uniquely and correctly identify each book but in some cases notes are added in square braces within the Title column to indicate something noteworthy, such as telling you that a different edition elsewhere in the table. Where a the title of a book title contains an ellipsis it is an indication that the full title was so long and verbose that it has been truncated. There were occasions when I reckoned the archive.org book details didn’t seem to be correct (for whatever reason) so occasionally you’ll find that information about titles, authors or dates in my table are not quite what you’ll find at archive.org.

The Topics column gives an indication of what kind of information is found in the books and can be rather vague. Sometimes I’ve given you what the archivist recorded as the topics, if anything. Sometimes I’ve added to their topic lists and sometimes I had to create the topic list myself. A consequence is that the list of topics can be rather erratic but better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick.

The Location column contains one or more URL links that take you to a web page where you can download the book. It’s perhaps sad to note that many of the old books have been digitised multiple times whereas many other old books remain only as “hard copy”. After awhile I got bored with finding alternative sources for the books so stopped bothering.

In all cases, visiting the URL will reveal a download available in PDF format. Often there are other file formats available as well. Alternative formats might be more suitable for use on a Kindle or mobile phone, for example. If you intend to download a copy of all the books in PDF format then you will need about 4GB of free disk space.

Bear in mind that copyright laws in different countries are not the same. Distributing this list of books and their locations will not breach any copyright but distributing the scanned book images and expecting payment might.

Here are the books I’ve found so far. There are even more out there!

Oh, and sorry about the bad layout of the table. Despite messing around with the undelying HTML I can’t force WordPress to present the information tidily.

The golden cabinet : being the laboratory, or handmaid to the arts : containing such branches of useful knowledge, as nearly concerns all kinds of people, from the squire to the peasant, and will afford both profit and delight